Navigate, read, construct : supporting immigrant children to comprehend English texts
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This study examined what strategies immigrant children use when trying to comprehend English texts, and how such children could be taught more effective strategies. Six children between the ages of 8; 7 and 11; 1 participated in the study; all were native speakers of Spanish who had moved to the United States no earlier than one year prior to the start of the study, and all attended the same elementary school in northern California. I used educational design research to plan, implement, and evaluate a plan for instruction for these students, and conducted periodic clinical interviews to learn about the children's approaches to comprehending English texts. Analytical induction was used to uncover patterns in the interview data, and these patterns were linked to instructional antecedents through review of teaching logs and notes on videos of the lessons. I found that all students, regardless of the amount of experience they had with English, had multiple strategies for drawing meaning from English texts. When hunting for answers in an article, they followed a universal pattern of navigating to a promising section of the text, reading it through words or pictures, and constructing a complete answer that went beyond parroting the text. Students' strategies for accomplishing these tasks changed over time, and many of their changes can be directly linked to lessons taught in class. Some strategies worked better for students with more exposure to English and proved to be inappropriate for children with less English experience. These findings have implications for the design of programs to support the burgeoning population of newcomer students in the United States.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | O'Brien, Ingrid Thea |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | Hakuta, Kenji |
| Thesis advisor | Hakuta, Kenji |
| Thesis advisor | Aukerman, Maren (Maren Songmy) |
| Thesis advisor | McDermott, Ray (Raymond Patrick), 1946- |
| Thesis advisor | Valdés, Guadalupe |
| Advisor | Aukerman, Maren (Maren Songmy) |
| Advisor | McDermott, Ray (Raymond Patrick), 1946- |
| Advisor | Valdés, Guadalupe |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Ingrid Thea O'Brien. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Ingrid Thea O'Brien
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...